In an apparent criticism of the plan, Davidson on Friday tweeted a link to a speech she made in favour of marriage equality, with the message: “As a Protestant unionist about to marry an Irish Catholic, here’s the Amnesty Pride lecture I gave in Belfast.”
“One of them is country, one of the others is LGBTI rights. I asked for a categoric assurance that if any deal or scoping deal was done with the DUP there would be absolutely no rescission of LGBTI rights in the rest of the UK, in Great Britain, and that we would use any influence that we had to advance LGBTI rights in Northern Ireland. [...]
While the party insists it is protecting the “traditional” definition of marriage, critics have denounced its stance as homophobic. Going back decades, the DUP was at the vanguard of the failed Save Ulster from Sodomy movement that campaigned against the 1982 legalisation of homosexual sex in Northern Ireland. [...]
In more recent times, former first minister Peter Robinson’s wife Iris, then an MP, described homosexuality as an “abomination”, while the MP son of Paisley, Ian Paisley Jr, said he felt “repulsed” by homosexual acts.
A party councillor in Ballymena reportedly claimed Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,500 people in the US, was God’s revenge for New Orleans hosting an annual gay pride event.
Former DUP Stormont minister Edwin Poots once hit out at a gay rugby team in Belfast, accusing it of introducing a sporting “apartheid” against heterosexual players. Poots also ended up in court for upholding a ban on gay men giving blood and, in a separate case, objecting to gay couples adopting. In the former case an appeal judge overturned a finding that he was motivated by bias.
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